Most people that own a residential home, only own that one home, and of which, for those of the middle class, this is their primary wealth that they so represent. However, there are a distinct minority of people as well as conglomerates, that own lots and lots of property, of which the usage of that excess property, above and beyond their main home or their main building, may lie completely unutilized, or underutilized, for years, or even decades; for basically this extra property is owned, primarily as a passive asset, or treated as such, which therefore signifies that it does not necessitate development or the rental of it.
The first thing to understand is that there are millions upon million of people that do not have a safe and sound home to reside in; and further to the point, there are millions upon millions of people that lack good access to nutritional food as well as the other accouterments that would help to make their lives to be, at a minimum, satisfactory. So then, the fact that there is good real estate so owned but providing no utility for the general public, the tax authorities, or even the owner of such, other than being an asset upon their books, is something that no good governance should encourage, and quite frankly it should be actively discouraged.
When those that are ultra-wealthy have no need and nary an incentive to do anything with some portion of the property that they so own, then it so follows that there isn’t any pressing reason why anything in regards to that property will change, anytime soon, or ever. On the other hand, when government asserts itself in a manner in which underutilized or unused property is actually taxed at a higher rate than comparable property that is being utilized, then perhaps this will provide the impetus for development to happen, or if not, a pressing reason to divest of such.
There is, after all, only so much one given family can own and actually do something of substance with; of which this same sort of principle applies also to conglomerates and to corporations, whenever they prefer to allow land to remain fallow or undeveloped – typically so done in order to maintain the pricing strength of what they are in the business of. There are, no doubt, good reasons why even prime real estate land need not be and should not be developed at a particular day and time, but those reasons should periodically be looked at and investigated, for the common good of the people of societies.
The ownership of any property, be it private, corporate, or governmental, necessitates at its core, a responsibility to the society that each are a member of. In short, each one of us must tread upon land, and live somewhere upon that land, of which, when a small and select minority are able to dictate to the majority, that they solely have the exclusive right to do what they so will or won’t do with their land property, per their volition; then a reasonable response to such a self-serving attitude is that in order for there to be some sort of fair play involved, good governance therefore steps in to appropriately tax or penalize that property of those that are not good and responsible stewards of the land they so own.